Union City supermarket ordered to pay workers $350K

A Union City supermarket will pay up $350,884 in back pay and damages to 20 employees after an investigation found violations of overtime, minimum wage and record keeping, the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division announced Tuesday.

R&J Supermarket Corp. -- known as the La Roca supermarket -- paid employees flat salaries without regard to the number of hours they worked in a workweek, a WHD investigation found. The practice violated minimum wage laws as employees were not paid the increased overtime wage when they worked more than 40 hours per week.

New Jersey law requires employers to pay one and one-half times employees' regular hourly rate for every hour worked exceeding 40 hours per week.

"Simply paying an employee a salary does not relieve an employer of its obligation to ensure that employees are paid the wages they have legally earned for all the hours they have worked," said John Warner, Northern New Jersey Wage and Hour Division district office director.

La Roca, located at 4416 Bergenline Ave., also paid some employees entirely off the books in cash, violating record-keeping guidelines, the investigation found.

The supermarket was also hit with a $5,491 civil penalty for the willful nature of the violations, which took place between 2016 and 2018, officials said.